Reforming the Community College Part IV

Students’ Lives and the “Guided Pathways” Model

    The typical community college offers a wide range of basic skills, academic, and occupational programs and courses, and this range of choices can be overwhelming, particularly for first-generation students. Research shows that even with advising – which many do not get – students might take courses that don't combine toward an academic or occupational goal, courses that might be unnecessary, out of sequence, even repeated. This inefficient and ineffective approach to course selection is the result of what Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins refer to as the “cafeteria” model of curriculum. Their recommended solution is the “Guided Pathways” model that I outlined in an earlier blog.
    In essence, the curriculum is restructured via a process of faculty and staff inquiry resulting in a limited number of course sequences that guide students toward specified goals: completion of requirements, occupational credentials, or other academic benchmarks. These pathways are not rigid and have room in them for students to make choices, but within boundaries. At the front end of their enrollment, students who are not decided on an academic or occupational area of concentration are guided to select a “meta-major,” a general area of interest, healthcare, for example, or English, arts, and humanities.
    This “Pathways” approach is not new; in 2006 sociologist James Rosenbaum and his colleagues offered similar ideas in an important book titled After Admission. But as I noted in that earlier blog, the Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins approach is getting a lot of attention.
    One more thing to say about the Guided Pathways model. Once the commitment to it is made, a huge amount of work follows: getting faculty and staff to collaborate in designing the pathways; deciding on the intellectual goals of the pathways (what do faculty and staff want students to learn); changing modes of classroom instruction to achieve those goals; properly and cautiously incorporating technology into advising and instruction; creating effective faculty development to implement these new approaches to instruction.
    I agree with much of what Bailey, et al recommend. (see Chapter Six “Improving the People’s College,” in Back to School.) Life would be improved for the typical student in all the ways the authors suggest. I do think, however, that getting the critical mass of faculty and staff to enact such change will be challenging, at best, as I suggested in my last blog.
    Let’s assume, however, that the kind of curricular and structural change sketched above transpires. The hope is that this more coherent and rational curriculum will significantly affect the community colleges’ low rates of persistence and completion. No doubt a successful Guided Pathways approach would improve the initial advising and guiding of students toward fields of emphasis. And the model would certainly add direction and coherence to course selection and the achievement of academic or occupational goals. On average, more students would go farther and more efficiently in less time.
But I would not want us to forget that the community college population today is a complex, widely varied one, more so than is found in any other institution of higher education in the United States. Bailey, et al offer a structural fix for the problems these students face once they enter the community college. Such a fix makes sense given the evidence that the current structure creates a host of barriers to student success. Still like all structural remedies, this one runs the risk of reducing nuanced and layered human dilemmas to a technical problem, and thus being unresponsive to or missing entirely the particular life circumstances of the people entering institutions. So, yes, make the college curriculum more coherent, but realize that other human and material resources will also be needed to meet the needs of many students, and, as well, build into your structural changes the flexibility needed to honor the range of life circumstances your students bring to college. Otherwise, the structural fix may create unintended negative consequences – something we’ve seen in public policy throughout the Twentieth Century.
    Some concerns:
    A significant number of people who go to community college are adults with family and other responsibilities. They can only go part-time. They can’t go every semester. They sometimes quit in mid-semester because of family emergencies or changes in employment. They go to two or three different institutions. A Guided Pathways model could help them in some ways – at the least lend coherence to their course selection – but not necessarily speed up their progress through college. For them, evening or weekend classes, good online courses, legitimate competency based options, counseling and advising in off-hours, weekends, or online would also be necessary.
    A different kind of problem lies at the other end of the college age continuum. We don't have in our country many avenues to help young people develop after high school. We don’t, for example, have a robust system of occupational apprenticeships or of national service. Young people who are not on the academic fast track and do not have a clear college goal have few options: entry-level, low-skilled, low-paying work or the military. Or they can enroll in the local community college hoping that some career path will reveal itself. Many such students don’t stay long, but those who do typically change their areas of study several times, shift between full-time and part-time attendance, start classes they don’t complete, stop-out and return to school. Eventually some find their way. A Guided Pathways model could help these students by more clearly delineating curricular and career options at a critical stage of early adult development.
But there are some powerful developmental dynamics going on here that lie beyond a structural fix in the curriculum. In interviewing such students, I’m struck by the simple but powerful fact that this process of discovery takes time. A lot of growing up happens: cutting back on partying and frivolous entertainments, changing one’s understanding of the purpose of school, bringing one’s fantasies in line with one’s abilities, learning how to manage time and to study. In some cases, students arrive at the big questions: Who am I? What kind of work do I want to do? What is meaningful work for me? Why am I on this Earth? It certainly could be argued that the community college is not the place to work all this out, but if the society provides limited transitional institutions or spaces, young people are left with few other options.
    Then there is the issue of the burdens students carry. I am continually struck by the hardship experienced by so many community college students. To be sure, middle-class students from stable and secure backgrounds attend community college, but, depending on the location of the college, many students come from low-income to destitute families; have to work thirty or more hours a week; live in cramped housing, some of which is substandard; are food-insecure; and have health problems that are inadequately treated. For some, there are worries about immigration. And some must contend with prior involvement in the criminal justice system, and some struggle with addiction.
    I have met a number of these students who are beating the odds and are succeeding. They have worked very hard, have overcome obstacles I can only imagine. They are completing or have completed occupational certificates and/ or are heading toward an associate of arts degree, and, in some cases, toward transfer. And every single one has been at their institutions for years. They changed their field of emphasis. They had to quit to work. They got sick or were injured or past physical or psychological trauma momentarily got the better of them. And there is one more thing. These students came from beleaguered, under-resourced schools, so did not receive an adequate K-12 education. Therefore, they are required to take multiple remedial courses in English and mathematics, courses that not only extend their time in school and drain financial aid, but can also present nearly insurmountable obstacles. A combination of poor preparation and anxiety – palpitations, sweating, going blank – have lead several students I’m mentoring to fail a remedial math course three times in a row, though they can do the problems handily in a non- testing setting. In addition to the structure Guided Pathways would offer these students, they need social services, expedited and possibly augmented financial aid, and specialized tutoring that would include techniques to manage anxiety and negative self- attributions about ability.
    In After Admission, Rosenbaum and his colleagues make the important point that a structural analysis of the problem with community college student success takes us “beyond individual blame” and focuses our attention on institutional factors that create barriers to academic progress. Bailey, et al offer a powerful corrective to these problematic structural features. I do not intend to refocus blame on students, but I think it would be a mistake to not attend to the details of their lives while conducting this structural analysis, otherwise this structural remedy might promise more than it can deliver – thus threatening its longevity – and also inadvertently contribute to the barriers students face.
    I can’t repeat enough that I support much of what Bailey, et al (and, before them, Rosenbaum and company) recommend. I would not want the issues I raise in my last few blogs to be used as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. I simply want to remind us that even with the most coherent and streamlined curricular pathways, there will still be a number of students who enroll in one course at a time, who stop out, who take years to find their academic or occupational path, whose past blunders and transgressions continue to exact a material and psychological price, whose personal history of neglect and even trauma can cripple their performance…. All this and more require institutional responses beyond Guided Pathways (though Guided Pathways could enhance these responses) as well as extra-institutional social services. The needs of the community college population require a range of programs and accommodations to make “the people’s college” more fully the uniquely American democratic institution it, at its best, can be.

Reforming the Community College, Part III

The Human Messiness of Implementing the “Guided Pathways” Model

            In my last blog, I summarized the “Guided Pathways” model of curriculum redesign presented in Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins’ Redesigning America’s Community College. This model is attracting a lot of attention and to varying degrees is stimulating reform efforts at community colleges across the country. As I stated in the last post, I generally agree with the authors’ criticisms of the typical community college’s structure and practices and see much that is good in their recommendations for reform. But I also have some concerns—maybe cautions in a better word—and in this blog will sketch out some that have to do with the social and political dynamics of establishing their Guided Pathways model.

            In a nutshell, the authors seek a restructuring of curriculum and of both instructional and student services practices that will require collaborative engagement on the part of faculty and staff, both within departments and across them. The authors realize the challenges of effecting such engagement and devote a chapter to the topic. They wisely begin the chapter by noting some of the difficulties: the possible lack of trust between administration and faculty and staff; the divide between faculty and student services; the disruptive role played by dissenters; etc. The authors then proceed to suggest strategies to work through these problems and present individual cases to illustrate the effective use of their strategies. For example, include dissenters in program planning, create planning teams that combine faculty with student services personnel, use data to question current practices, etc. This is a legitimate way to structure such a chapter.

            But such a structure implies that the barriers to change listed at the beginning of the chapter can be overcome with the management and group facilitation techniques presented in the remainder of the chapter—an impression reinforced by the lack of any examples or discussion of what to do when the techniques fail.

            The authors have a wealth of experience studying two- and four-year colleges, so they surely know how messy and unpredictable the process of reform can be. Perhaps they (or their editor) decided that it was best to present their model and a process to achieve it, and not to overly complicate things with extended discussion of potential pitfalls and blunders. Fair enough. And perhaps the authors’ disciplinary backgrounds in economics, policy analysis, and quantitative methodologies limit their treatment of the tangled day-to-day dynamics of status, power, and turf—which, depending on the institution, can include everything from budgets to racial tensions to contentious personal histories. To limit treatment of all this is a legitimate choice, but should be stated and underscored, for my worry is that individual colleges attempting the reforms suggested by Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins will encounter more of a minefield than anticipated and possibly scrap or significantly weaken the implementation of ideas that have real merit.

            Let me illustrate my concerns with three examples.

***

Turf, power, status, and ideology

            The organizational compartmentalizing and the administrative hierarchies that exist in the community college are not only structural features; they are electric with power and status. The various methods suggested by Bailey, et al. to bring people together to work through these dynamics toward the common goal of creating Guided Pathways are good ones, tried and true in the toolkit of management theory. They can yield results. But they also can be foiled by genuine ideological differences about the purpose of a particular area of study or of education in general. They can also be foiled by turf protection, administrative power struggles, and pure and simple personal animosity. As one administrative staff person I know said in exasperation, “It’s incredibly difficult to do anything outside of your own classroom.”

            To be sure, change happens. I’ve witnessed several successful programs take shape over the past few years as a core of energetic and creative faculty are given the resources to run with their ideas. But during that same time I’ve also seen such groups—inspired, seemingly tireless people—be stonewalled or shut down by larger groups of faculty within their subject area, or by their department heads, or by middle managers who want to protect turf or avoid the distribution of power.

Working from shared values

            Bailey, et al. suggest arriving at shared values as a starting place for examining current practices and changing them. For example, the authors write “In our experience, faculty and staff choose to work at community colleges because they believe in the open-access mission and are passionate about improving students’ lives.” This is generally true in my experience, but with two qualifications—which illustrate how arriving at shared values can be more complicated than it seems.

            First, regarding the embrace of the open-access mission of the community college, a percentage of faculty at most institutions believe that some of the students they teach should not be in college, and certainly not in their classrooms. These faculty align themselves with the universities that educated them, want to teach students who have some affinity for their discipline, and are not at all trained to work with students who are academically underprepared. In some cases, these faculty are younger and are at the community college because that was the only position available in a tight job market. In other cases, these are older faculty who have been at the college for decades and lived through a significant shift in student demographics. They look back nostalgically at a golden age—one that most likely did not exist as they remember it.

            My second qualification is this: faculty can have quite different beliefs about concepts like “improving students’ lives.” And some of these differing beliefs can present resilient barriers to change. One faculty member believes that to change methods of instruction will compromise standards and lead to sub-par education. Another believes that students—particularly those with poor academic backgrounds—need to have positive experiences in school, so avoids challenging them intellectually. And yet another operates with racial, class, or gender biases that limit what he or she thinks is realistic for some students in school or career.

Using data to facilitate program development

            We live in an age of “data-driven” decision-making. The assumption is that when faced with data about student or instructor or program performance, faculty and staff with guidance will engage in reflection and behavioral change. But we read data through multiple interpretive lenses. Bailey, et al. quote a faculty member who, upon reviewing “data from a series of student focused groups” exclaims “Oh my god, I’ve been misadvising my students all these years!” Some people will respond thus—and thank goodness for them. But other responses are also possible, and I’ve heard them directly or had them reported to me. People don’t believe the data—especially in institutions where there is a high level of distrust between faculty and administrators. People question the way the data were obtained. People blame the students. This last response is a big one where test data or pass/fail rates are concerned. When faced with data demonstrating the low pass rates in remedial English or math, some faculty respond by stating that those students don’t belong here. As one community college staff member said to me, “It’s hard to admit we’ve been doing something wrong.” To admit that one’s practice over the years has been ineffective is a blow to one’s professional identity.

***

            Again I want to make clear that I generally agree with Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins’ analysis of the problems with the traditional community college’s structure and mode of operation. The issues I raise in Back to School, though expressed differently, are in line with their analysis. I also think the Guided Pathways Model has many virtues. My goal in this blog is to note the kinds of entanglements community college personnel are likely to encounter as they attempt to follow Bailey’s implementation plan, which I find to be thin on the political and social dynamics of institutional change. The management and group facilitation techniques suggested in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges are good and useful, but play out on a complex human landscape, so might well need to be combined with savvy, possibly Machiavellian leadership; with horse-trading; with both symbolic and financial incentives; with the strategic use of personal relationships; and, unfortunately, at times, with reassignment or marginalization of obstructionist personnel. Change can be difficult and bruising.

            In my next blog, I’ll consider the diverse realities of community college students’ lives in relation to the key features of the Guided Pathways model.

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Reforming the Community College, Part II

The “Guided Pathways” Model

            In my last post, I gave a quick overview of the community college, highlighting some of its achievements and current problems. The problem now getting the most national attention is the low rate of persistence and completion: approximately 30% of students finish a degree or occupational credential in four years. There have been a number of attempts over the last few decades to address this poor record of success, from a rethinking and restructuring of remedial English and mathematics to more intensive, technology-enhanced ways to provide orientation and advising.

            A comprehensive reform plan that is much discussed right now is the “guided pathways” model put forth in Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins’ Redesigning America’s Community Colleges. This book condenses and focuses years of research—a fair amount of which comes out of Columbia’s Community College Research Center, which Bailey directs. I am going to consider these authors’ model in this and the remaining posts I write in my upcoming blogs on the community college.

            Bailey, et al. locate the fundamental problem with the community college in the structure of its curriculum and the institutional assumptions that undergird that structure. In its attempt to serve all members of its area, the typical community college has allowed to proliferate a wide range of academic, occupational, general interest, and service courses and programs. Though some type of orientation and counseling and advising are typically available, their quality and effectiveness vary, and counselors’ case load—1,000 students per counselor is not uncommon—works against any substantial contact. And many students don’t utilize these services at all.

            As the authors see it, community colleges “offer an array of often-disconnected courses, programs, and support services that students are expected to navigate on their own. Students are confused by a plethora of poorly explained program, transfer, and career options; moreover, on closer scrutiny many programs do not clearly lead to the further education and employment outcomes they are advertised to help students achieve. We refer to this as a cafeteria-style, self-service model.” Students, many of whom are the first in their families to go to college, might enter college without a clear goal and/or get inadequate or incomplete advising, take courses that don't lead to a specified outcome, take courses out of sequence, or take courses they don’t need at all.

            As remedy, the authors suggest a more structured approach. Community colleges “need to engage faculty and student services professionals in creating more clearly structured, educationally coherent program pathways that lead to students’ end goals, and in rethinking instruction and student support services in ways that facilitate students’ learning and success as they progress along these paths. In short, to maximize both access and success, a fundamental redesign is necessary. We refer to the resulting strategy as the guided pathways model.”

            The authors acknowledge the laudable reforms attempted recently, such as improving the curriculum for remedial courses and streamlining them or creating programs at the front end of college to better orient and guide new students. But these reforms have had limited impact on completion, the authors claim, because the large macro-structure of the “cafeteria model” remained in place. Broad structural change is needed.

            To realize the Guided Pathways Model faculty and staff would create sequences of courses that lead to clearly defined outcomes: for example, an occupational credential or sub-specialty certification; an Associate of Arts degree in one of the social sciences; transfer status in physical science to a state university. Because many students enter without a clear goal—this is a major issue in the community college—there will be “meta-majors” that reflect broad areas of interest (e.g., business; health care; English, arts, and humanities), “each of which features a default curriculum that gives students a taste of the given field and helps them either narrow down their choice to a specific program or switch to another area of interest.”

            This major restructuring of the curriculum provides direction for other significant institutional reforms that will aid in retention and completion.

            Instruction. The faculty working within a particular pathway will together define “the skills, concepts, and habits of mind” they want students to develop through the pathway “and map out how students will build those learning outcomes across courses.” Librarians, instructional technology specialists, and student services staff will assist faculty in incorporating “innovative approaches to teaching and learning.”

            Orientation and advising. At the front end, increased effort will go to helping students clarify goals and choose a major or “meta-major”. Orientation to college will be beefed up, and students will be enrolled in courses that provide ongoing information and guidance about college life. Through the increased integration of technology into advising, students will receive timely feedback on their progress, and instructors and counselors will be alerted when something goes awry—for example, a student drops a course.

            Remedial or developmental education. Because so many community college students are held for one or more remedial courses, and because the traditional remedial sequences in math, writing, and reading can include as many as four courses for each subject, students required to take multiple courses are stalled in their progress and have a higher probability of dropping out. Here the authors of Redesigning America’s Community Colleges adopt the various reforms of remediation currently in place: fewer, more intensive courses; additional instruction and tutoring added to courses; math, writing, or reading taught in the context of a student’s curricular pathway, e.g., a writing course built on topics and readings from healthcare or a math course linked to a psychology or sociology course. The authors’ assumption is that these currently existing improved remedial courses will function more effectively as part of a pathways model, becoming an “on ramp” to a student’s college-level course of study.

            The above in a nutshell is the redesign of the community college advocated by Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins. As the authors admit, aspects of it are already in play, but not brought together in such a comprehensive fashion. A few two- and four-year colleges are implementing some version of the pathways model to good effect, and the authors profile them.

            I think the pathways idea is a good one. I have known so many students who would have benefitted tremendously from it—would have taken fewer courses that were extraneous to their goals, used up less financial aid money, moved more quickly toward completion of a certificate or degree or toward transfer to a four-year school. And I think the suggested reforms that follow, especially related to orientation and advising are long overdue. I raise similar suggestions in Back to School. And as for the rethinking of remediation, I’ve been on that boat for thirty-plus years. So I want to be clear in my agreement with and support of the reforms laid out in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges.

            But I do have some observations and in some cases reservations to offer, and I will begin to lay them out in my next blog.

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Reforming the Community College, Part I

    I took a break from my blog over December, and I’m glad to be back at it. I am going to be writing about higher education for a while, mostly about the community college. Rather than the neglect that community colleges typically endure, lately they have been in the spotlight of reform, originating both from federal and state governments and from non-profit advocacy organizations and philanthropies. Many of the reforms target significant problems (e.g., low graduation rates) and offer reasonable remedies – for example, rethinking how colleges conduct developmental education. For some time now, I have been involved with these issues, and I would like to use my blog to reflect on current community college reform efforts, particularly those recommended in a heralded, widely circulating book that reflects years of work at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center: Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins’ Redesigning America’s Community Colleges.

    First, a very quick overview of the community college and the core issues.

    The community college is a uniquely American institution; The Economist, always primed to take a swipe at our education system, calls the community college a “magnificent” achievement. The first public community college was founded in 1901, and today there are 1150 of them spread across every state in the union. Over their history, they have been both praised and criticized for the quality of their instruction, for the support they provide their students, and for the breadth of their mission which, typically, has been broader than that of any other educational institution in the United States – from offering enrichment courses for members of their communities to providing basic English and math instruction and occupational training.

    In our time, the community college has provided access to higher education for untold millions of students; about 10 million are currently enrolled, 40% of whom are the first in their families to go to college. The community college has been called “the people’s college.”

    But the community college is burdened with challenges. To begin, it is chronically underfunded, and during economic downturns its budgets are cut, never to be fully restored when the economy bounces back. And since most community colleges are open admission, they often have more students than seats, especially for key courses, so classes are overloaded and hard to get, and student progress is stalled. For all the positive things their students bring to community colleges, those students, on average, come from less affluent families and school districts, so might need additional academic assistance. (Some colleges in poor areas place over 80% or more of their students in remedial English or math.) Many students are older, have family obligations, and cannot attend full time. Those students who are first generation college goers might lack knowledge of how higher education works, details about financial aid, the routines of class selection and enrollment – and have limited social networks to help them with all this. For a host of reasons – some within their sphere of responsibility, some not – many colleges have a difficult time responding to these multiple student needs.

    Community colleges have done quite well in opening their doors to prospective students, but done less well in retaining them. Approximately 30% of community college students complete a degree or credential in four years. That is a dreary statistic. It should be noted however that while the majority of students upon entry do say they want to complete a certificate or degree, many, in fact, shift to shorter-term goals in response to personal needs, family demands, or opportunities in the job market. Here are several examples. 

    A man in his early twenties, a high school dropout with past addiction problems, entered an electrical construction program and over his first year got absorbed in school, developed some literacy and numeracy and trade skills, and began to see himself in a different light. He quit before completing his occupational certificate to join the navy where he could continue his education, clear his debts, and have a potential career before him. A woman with two children already had a low-level job in the fashion industry, and she entered a fashion program to take four or five courses that built sufficient skills to get a better job in her company. Both of these people would be recorded as dropouts. It is also the case that approximately 60 percent of community college students attend more than one school, so we won’t get a complete picture of their postsecondary experience by focusing on their exit from the initial college.

    Still, the community college has to do better with retaining and graduating its students. In my next blog, I will sketch out some of the major efforts to attain that goal. 

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